Last week (Wordings Fourteen) I told you I was with the Association for the Palliative Turn at the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, writing Death Limericks. This week, I’m sharing them with you.
The APT is a non-heirarchical collection of artists, scientists, economists and palliative carers, which sets out to make art which is palliative not curative - which accepts the end of things as we know them (ourselves, our society, the world) without falling into nihilism or destructiveness, but rather with kindness, compassion and humour. It both is and isn’t a joke.
I spent the two days writing Death Poetry. There’s a Japanese tradition of deathbed haikus which I took inspiration from. Now, I’m not Japanese and I’m not on my deathbed, so I took a poetic form from my own tradition (the limerick) and I left the last line of each one unfinished. When I am on my deathbed, I’ll finish them. If I die at short notice, they’ll stay as they are.
My process was to sit in a tent with the artist Louise Ashcroft, with a bucket for visitors to give me inspiration. I invited them to write “what you think about when you think about death.” The names on the notecards are from those inspirations.
Here are a selection:
Death Limerick 4
There once was a man and he tried
To avoid it, but nonetheless died.
Looking back, he reflected,
In a way unexpected:
“
Death Limerick 10
Is dying a change, or an ending?
A ripping apart, or a mending?
“To be one,” said my mother
“Doesn’t rule out the others.”
Death Limerick 13
Excited for what happens next
She writes the last words of her text,
Puts down her pen,
Breathes in, and then
Death Limerick 2
Death oftentimes comes on the road -
Auf Deutsch, “auf der Autobahn: Tod!”
Partway through the journey
We suddenly learn we
Death Limerick 15
Tell me, when my time’s nearly ended
Are the pains of these present years mended?
The miscarriage, divorce,
Now time’s taken its course,
I found out how to write these by writing them - and realised halfway through day one that I was in effect collaborating with an older version of myself. Sometimes I could tell what the last line should be, and had to hope that my dying self would remember; at other times I had no one idea how the poem will end. In some - as in number 15 - I found myself asking a question in search of an answer that won’t come for years.
They are, of course, finished as they are. Hopefully, I’ll get the chance to finish them again.
This year at the Edinburgh festival I’m remounting all 10 of my comedy solo shows, which is 14 years of work (tickets here). This week, I started preparing in earnest. I sat down with Gareth Gwynn to piece together what happened in my first ever show “Distracts You From A Murder,” from 2010 (Gareth, a comedy writer and my sometimes collaborator, played my stooge in that show). We read through the (incomplete) original script, trying to remember what “nanotechnologists” joke was, or “starfish” routine. Sometimes, a joke would suddenly lurch up from deep in our collective unconsicous, unspoken in over a decade. It was fun, and strange to meet a former version of myself. In some ways, a different person; in some ways, me.
It seemed fitting to begin the week collaborating with my older self, before diving into these collaborations with my younger ones.
Take care of yourselves,
John-Luke